


Is this darkness in you too?

by stripeypirate



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Haruno Sakura-centric, Introspection, One Shot, Valley of the End, but sakura gets a sharingan, team seven doesn't get their happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-07 00:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6777220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stripeypirate/pseuds/stripeypirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Valley of the End: a place where legends clashed and the fate of the shinobi world was twice held in the balance. For Sakura, it is the place where her eyes were opened and her heart was closed. </p>
<p>(After all, a shinobi must never shed tears).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is this darkness in you too?

Sakura raced towards the valley, her heart pumping wildly in her throat. Kakashi’s words echoed between every harsh breath she took.

_The final fight._

She knew now that Naruto would never turn a hand against his friend. Once he’d made up his mind about something he clung to it like a limpet, and nothing short of death would relinquish his hold.

_Sasuke on the other hand…_

Sakura had seen firsthand his transformation from a reserved, sullen boy into this… monster. How he’d looked her dead in the eye, chidori blazing, and hadn’t flinched.

_Kakashi was right- he’s not the person we grew up with anymore. All that hatred and revenge, it’s warped him. I like to think that deep, deep, down, he still cares about us, but it’s time to face reality. Sasuke is dangerous and needs to be stopped, by any means necessary._

Her heart tightened like a fist inside her.

_If Naruto can’t do it, then I will!_

She increased her speed; who knew how far the two boys could have gone in the time she was unconscious.

_What if I’m too late?_

Sakura tossed her head defiantly, shaking off the tears that were starting to blur around the edges of her vision.

_I’m not that helpless little girl I was back during the Chuunin exams. Naruto and Sasuke have grown stronger, but so have I. They’ve underestimated me all these years but now… I’m the only one left who can save them. That can save us._

Just there, over the bluff; two figures lying spread-eagle, staring up at the sky like dolls cast aside by a careless child. The detritus of their fight splayed out around them in the form of jagged rock and long, sickly gashes in the earth.  Neither was moving.

Sakura let her instincts take over, putting her well-honed brain, along with all its insecurities and fears, to rest.

_"Triage,”_ She heard Tsunade whisper in her ear. _“The first step when you have multiple casualties; figure out who you can save and who you can’t. No use wasting your chakra on a lost cause. A medic nin must help as many people as possible, even if that means sacrificing a mortally wounded teammate.”_

She’d frowned and tugged her hair then, still an innocent girl who hadn’t faced the realities of war. Of course she’d nodded in agreement with her sensei, but secretly in her heart she harbored the idea that she too would be like Naruto and never give up. Never let a life slip through her fingers when she could do something about it.   

Staring down at two broken, battered bodies with her chakra depleted from healing hundreds of faceless soldiers, Sakura found herself re-evaluating that philosophy.

_“Medic nin see people at their very worse; bloodied, naked, scared. It’s your job to be professional. Block out your own personal feelings of pity or horror. Your task is to save a life, not ruminate on it. Remember, a shinobi must never show tears and that goes doubly for us.”_

She knelt on shaking legs next to her boys-no, her _patients_ \- and let gentle stream of chakra run down each arm to probe for injuries. She closed her eyes to better concentrate. Separating out the different data she was receiving from each person while simultaneously interpreting it was fiendishly difficult and was why medics rarely worked on more than one person at a time. But she’d learned from the best, after all.

Despite her attempts at cold, rational thought, Sakura quailed. The severed arms, while gory and impressive injuries in their own right, were merely the tip of the iceberg. Naruto’s liver had been crushed by a superhuman punch. His heart was racing dangerously fast, trying to keep up with the rate of blood that was pouring out of him as cells screamed for oxygen.

Sasuke was even worse. In addition to the physical injuries he’d sustained, Sakura could sense some sort of molecular damage throughout his body, eating away at his chakra network like a cancer. She thought of the awesome power of the Susano’o, how it seemed to tear itself out of him every time he used it.

_It isn’t fair._

Her fingertips trembled, cutting off the flow of information. She wanted to howl and the sky, grab each boy by his shoulders and shake him awake, all the while cursing the stubborn, macho attitude that had brought them to this point in the first place.

_What should I do, Tsunade?_

Tears sprang dangerously close to her lashes. She’d just have to save them both. How else could she repay Naruto, and his diligence to the promise he’d made? Sakura swiped her thumb over his pale cheek as she brushed Sasuke’s bangs out of his eyes.

_Now it’s your turn to watch my back again._

 

* * *

 

An hour later and her arms were shaking with exhaustion. Sweat dripped into her eyes but she didn’t dare move to wipe it away. She was putting every shred of concentration, every fiber of her being, into the healing process but it wouldn’t be enough.

She sat back on her heels with a gasp. _How do you do it?_ She wanted to scream at Naruto’s unconscious form. _How do you make the impossible possible through sheer force of will? There’s nothing I want more than this but I can’t… I can’t…_

A dry sob escaped her throat. She would have to choose.

 

* * *

 

She kept to herself after the War, rented a single-bedroom apartment and filled it with books, gradually let her old friends slip away one by one. Ino still made half-hearted attempts to bring her flowers on her birthday, which Sakura usually left on her kitchen counter until they rotted, unable to decide if she should put them in a vase or throw them out.

A set of mis-matched eyes greeted her in the mirror every morning. Purple and green. Like the flowers she used to pick outside the Academy while she imagined giving them to a certain lonely boy. 

She’d made a choice; her best friend over her childhood love. Her village over her happiness. Because Sakura knew deep in her bones that Sasuke was never meant to be Hokage. Not the way Naruto was, with his languid smile he still managed to put on, his easygoing, affable underdog charm that he somehow still possessed despite having matured into one of the most powerful ninja to ever walk the earth.

She stood in the crush of people at his inauguration, listened to thousands of shinobi and civilians alike chant his name, and tried to feel a spark of pride.

_He’s here because of me. What I sacrificed. Isn’t it all worth it now?_

Scanning the crowd, Naruto’s eyes locked with hers. A flash of accusatory blue. She felt her sharingan activate involuntarily; a now-familiar spike of pain in her temple.

_He should’ve been here to see this. It’s my fault he didn’t come home and now I’m wearing his eyes like some sort of trophy._

The moment passed and Naruto waved cheerily at the villagers, the Hokage robes crisp against a cloudless sky. Hinata hovered by his side, shirking from the attention but her face was beaming up at his.

_At least you got a happy ending._

She elbowed her way out and ducked down a side street that would take her back home. There wasn’t anything more she needed to see.

 

* * *

 

Sakura was resting on the couch, a bag of ice pressed against her throbbing eyelids when Kakashi swung himself over her windowsill on feather-light feet.

“The door’s open.” She grunted. “And I could hear you coming a mile away. You must be getting old.”

“Hungover at this hour of the day? You’re becoming more like your master than I thought,” he shot back smoothly.

Sakura lifted the ice to glare at him.

“What do you want?”

“I imagine today’s been difficult for you.”

“Spare me the therapy session, Kakashi. I’ll deal with it.” She wanted to settle back into the darkness, the cold comfort of solitude. At least then she could feel close to him.

His knees popped as he settled into the chair next to her with a sigh.

“It’s been almost five years-”

“I know.”

“I keep thinking you’re going to show up on my doorstep and ask how to use it.”

Sakura curled in on herself. She’d done her research- dug up moldering texts in the Classified section of the Konoha archives, poured over complicated jutsu charts containing a wealth of theories and dry explanations of the specific chakra manipulation required. She’d even gone poking around the old Uchiha compound, still preserved with an almost museum-like quality. An unspoken tomb. Her sharingan had stirred with such familiarity at the sight of the cracked and fading crests that it frightened her. That night her dreams had been filled with fragmented images of people she’d never met, but she woke in the morning to a pillow damp with tears.

“It feels wrong,” Sakura croaked out. “And before you say you know how I feel, you don’t,” she added as she sensed Kakashi was about to speak. “Yours was a gift. Mine…”

_I stole them._

Her memory was a blur after the transplant. She couldn’t tell how long she’d lain on the ground until Kakashi had arrived. All she could see was blood. Even days later in the hospital, it filled her senses with hot, sticky copper. Crawled down her throat to pool in her stomach where she’d stuffed the wounded animal cries that longed to break free.

“Why did you take his eyes in the first place then?” As always, his voice was carefully neutral, but Sakura could feel him tensing, straining forward despite efforts to calm his chakra. She’d become much more sensitive to that sort of thing since The Valley of The End.

“Someone had to reverse the Infinite Tsukoyomi. And then… what if there was another threat to the village? A shinobi shouldn’t let power like that go to waste. It would be irresponsible.”

“You don’t have to trot out the same lie you told the council,” Kakashi said, a tad harshly.

Sakura sucked in a breath. _I did the right thing. Why doesn’t matter. It’s what he would’ve wanted. I have to believe that._ She owed her former sensei the truth at the very least.

“I thought maybe it would help me understand, just a little, why he left. What clouded his heart so badly he couldn’t see us anymore.” She sat up and hugged her knees to her chest. “That if I was going to give up, I should at least be the one to bear the burden of his hatred. It seemed fair at the time.”

Kakashi hummed through his nose, neither affirming nor condemning.

She couldn’t bring herself to add that she felt more connected to him now than ever before.

“Naruto fills out the Hokage robes pretty well, doesn’t he?” Sakura asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Ah so you came to the ceremony after all.”

“H-how is he?”

Kakashi ran a hand through his hair. “Why don’t you ask him? He invited me out for ramen with Hinata tonight. You can be my plus one.”

_“Those that break the rules and regulations are scum, but those who abandon their comrades are even worse than scum.”_

Sakura politely asked him to get the fuck out of her apartment.

 

* * *

 

A messenger hawked tapped on her window a few hours later.

“I’m heading to Ichiraku’s now. The offer still stands.”

She startled the bird away with the violence with which she balled up the note and tossed it in the trash. 

_How dare he? Like we can ever be a team again…_

Sakura stood in the middle of her empty kitchen, breathing heavily. The sink kept up a maddening, monotonous drip for several minutes before she wrenched the faucet shut with her fist. Her landlord would not be pleased the next morning.

_Five years… What was it they say about time healing wounds?_

She still kept the framed photograph of Team Seven in a box stuffed on the top shelf of her closet. Sakura took it out in tip-toe and let her sharingan bleed through, the relief that came with its release like finally scratching an itch.

Whether it was the mystic power of the Uchiha or just plain old hindsight, Sakura could already see them coming apart; a slow, tectonic drift that would eventually bring them smashing back together. A force of nature.

It was written in Sasuke’s tight shoulders, Naruto’s jealous pout, and even her own blind smile.

_We were doomed from the start._

**Author's Note:**

> Damn, I was really tempted to make this a multi-chaptered fic but I'm working on too many projects already (For those of you waiting on the next chapter of Miles to Go Before I Sleep, it's in progress- I swear!) Perhaps another day... For now enjoy bitter, nihilistic Sakura :')
> 
> As always, thanks to RedBeardtheNotPirate for the beta! Comments and kudos' are forever appreciated.


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